News/Research

Alum Jen Schradie at OECD 2019 Forum

19 Jun, 2019

Alum Jen Schradie at OECD 2019 Forum

Alum Jen Schradie participated in the OECD 2019 Forum in a panel on People-Power vs. Populism with Jamie Bartlett, William Davies, and Carne Ross, moderated by Rym Momtaz.

The OECD Forum was created in 2000 to discuss the key economic and social challenges on the international agenda.

It is an important part of the annual OECD Week that also features the OECD main Ministerial meeting.

This 2-day public engagement event gathers high-level government representatives, CEOs, leaders from civil society and trade unions as well as prominent members of academia and media.

From the description:

Globalisation and digitalisation have knit our economies and societies closer together than ever before. Yet, along the way, they have also undermined the complex webs of trust relations that bind us together. In doing so, they have laid bare the distance between citizens’ aspirations, and the capacity of their representatives to deliver on their promises. Distrustful of so-called “elites”, some increasingly vote for populist leaders claiming to represent the “general will”, while some others increasingly seek to take matters into their own hands.

Populism is sometimes described as a drunken guest at democracy’s dinner party. It disrupts table manners and the tacit rules of sociability by shouting what everyone knew, but had politely preferred to keep quiet. By uncovering the hypocrisy and failures of the assembly, populism shatters the status-quo and, in so doing, acts as a conduit for change. Sprung from frustration with conventional top-down politics, leaderless revolutions and people powered movements, such as Occupy, the #MeToo movement, or Climate Marches, share this willingness to expose shameful shortcomings, and thereby prompt what they regard as much-needed change.

However, the pretention of populism to embody the sovereign will of the People places it on a collision course with the liberal features of modern democracies. As for leaderless revolutions, they can play a key role in reshaping societal norms and ingraining new ideas into the political landscape. Yet, their lack of leadership and inability to structure a cohesive set of demands render them inadequate for complicated decision-making, and may condemn them to wither away. With the status-quo increasingly looking unsustainable, how then are we to chart a path for lasting political change in a World in EMotion?

Find out more here: https://www.oecd.org/forum/programme/#!142037

You can even watch this incredible discussion here!